"The New York Times dubbed 2012 the year of the MOOCs – massive open online courses. Suddenly the discourse of MOOCs and the future of the university hit the headlines with influential reports using the language of “the revolution to come.”.

This articles sets out some of the thinking behind the MOOC 'revolution', and is a compact review of the subject. Some highlights relevant to #oerrrhub:

"One of the claims that has been made is that the major MOOC providers do not tend to hire people who have experience or training in instructional design, course design, digital pedagogy, the learning sciences or educational technology. Instead they are hiring programmers, often with little or no experience."

"MOOCs are to get a great push from legislation being considered in the California and Florida senates. Senate Bill 520 – “Student instruction: California Online Student Incentive Grant programs” – was introduced by Sen. Darrell Steinberg in early June 2013 and passed unanimously, although the amendments have been significant. The position paper The Right to Educational Access: Using Online Education to Address Bottleneck Courses in California, written for The 20 Million Minds Foundation, outlines the extent of the bottleneck problem and the online solution. Nearly 90 percent of California’s 112 community colleges reported waiting lists for courses in autumn 2012, with an average of 7,000 students on waiting lists per college. Meanwhile, only 60 percent of students at the University of California and a paltry 16 percent at California State University were able to earn a degree within the standard four years, largely because of their inability to register for the courses they need to graduate."

The conclusion is worth reproducing in full:

"I would like to suggest that “peer philosophies” are at the heart of a radical notion of “openness” and would advocate the significance of peer governance, peer review, peer learning and peer collaboration as a collection of values that form the basis for open institutions and open management philosophies. This form of openness has been theorized in different ways by John Dewey, Charles Sanders Pierce and Karl Popper as a “community of inquiry” – a set of values and philosophy committed to the ethic of criticism that offers means for transforming our institutions in what Antonio Negri and others call the age of cognitive capitalism. Expressive and aesthetic labor (“creative labor”) demands institutional structures for developing “knowledge cultures” as “flat hierarchies” that permit reciprocal academic exchanges as a new basis for public institutions.

The reinvention of the university as a public institution allows an embrace of a diverse philosophical heritage based on the notions of “public”: “the public sphere,” “publics” (in the plural), “civil society” and “global public sphere” – all concepts that hold open the prospect of addressing the local and the global – both the community, the regional as well as the national and the global. This is a philosophy out of which values can be forged and orientations adopted that reflect this heritage, which squares with an institutional identity as a part of a historical public system of higher education and which contributes to a global civic agenda of common world problems. MOOCs have a significant role to play in this situation.

The notion of the university as a public knowledge institution needs to reinvent a language and to initiate a new discourse that reexamines the notions of “public” and “institution” in a digital global economy characterized by increasing intercultural and international interconnectedness. This discourse needs to begin by understanding the historical and material conditions of its own future possibilities, including threats of the monopolization of knowledge and privatization of higher education together with the prospects and promise of forms of openness (open source, open access, open education, open science, open management) that promote the organization of digital creative labor and the democratization of access to knowledge."

New research suggests we may be exaggerating the generation gap in the workplace.

Tom Hood's insight:

Having the privilege of working across all of the generations in a professional association (CPAs), I think the "generational issues" are more a function of how technology and the workplace have changed over the last decade.

As we move from "command and control" environments to "connect and collaborate", there are significant differences that manifest themselves in the workplace. These differences seem to coincide with the age groups identified across generations.

I find your research that three in five millennials want to learn from their managers is spot on, if not even higher. However, when they say that, they often comment that it is difficult to get their senior managers to "listen" and appreciate their perspectives.

At the end of the day, your article comes back to the right answer, "Becton says, to build office practices flexible enough to suit a variety of personalities."

Herein is the answer, we need to listen more, create environments that foster better communication and collaboration. As we discovered in our big "generational symposium" (http://cpa.tc/2un), talk to each other!

What do you think? Is this generational thing overblown? Or are there real differences we need to work on?

70% 0f CFOs agree that finding and keeping the right talent is their #1 issues according to WSJ CFO - Deloitte.

CFOs are finding their current staff skills lacking. In fact, in the 4Q2011 survey, 75% of CFOs said their staffs needed stronger analytical skills, 60% needed better political acumen and almost half required facilitation skills and macro­economic knowledge.

This skill and talent shortage is further complicated by the changes in leadership and learning as a result of the generational issues in the workplace today. Sound familiar?

Privately-held U.S. businesses had a great year in 2013, according to recent data from financial information provider Sageworks. But while dozens of financial metrics make it clear that companies had a lot going for them this year, what about the near...

Tom Hood's insight:

Encouraging news with some caution as sales growth seems to be slowing. Profitability is up most likely due to the "do more with less" attitude in the context of uncertainty around major government policies like healthcare, taxes, etc. We are hearing this from our CPAs as well.

Data-driven stats from Sageworks about the state of private companies in the US.

Though it started on January 8th, you are still very welcome to sign up for this online free course on content curation, organized by Sam Burrough and Martin Couzins that will last for the next two weeks.

Here the key topics covered:

Why do we need curators?

What is digital curation?

What’s the difference between aggregation and curation?

Do you know your audience?

Passion for your topic

Practical ways to manage and filter information flows

Tools for curation

From the official course page: "This course would suit anyone who is looking to understand more about curation and wants help to get started. It’s aimed at people in marketing, internal or external communications, learning and development and anyone who wants to share their passion for a topic with the world."

British television screens are filled again this Autumn with images of creative individuals participating in Professional MasterChef. One of the first challenges the contestants face is to select from...

Tom Hood's insight:

Great post. Thought-provoking, inspiring and I love the metaphor of the chef's who are adding their unique flair to the standard recipes. Even better is the Drucker to Perlman evolution of knowledge worker to knowledgeable networker. I love this term as it denotes the constant acquisition of knowledge (think L>C) and the building of relationships as the "networker"

The description of a "new organizational model" is what I believe is meant by the new term "social business" and the principles are spot on:

- A dispersed workforce motivated by a common purpose

- A permeable structure allowing for collaboration with and access to the knowledge of others both within and without the artificial boundaries of the company

- A workforce comprised of adaptable employees who truly adopt matrix working practices. That is, individuals who are able to lead, to follow, to contribute expertise across multiple projects and activities, and to facilitate the learning of others - often fulfilling all of these roles on any given day

-A group of people willing to take a risk and foster both their own creativity and that of others.

In the US CPA (Certified Public Accounting) Profession, we are seeing signs of disruption and the desires of many young professionals to want to live and work in an environment that more closely resembles your description of a new model. In fact, I am seeing many of these young professionals begin to start their own firms and organizations to create the types of businesses they want to be a part of.

Wishing you much success in 2014 and thanks for the insights and inspiration!

is your strategy moving faster than your business? Can CPA firms get disrupted and what are CFOs doing to guide their businesses in a "transient advantage" economy? Riat McGrath has some thoughts on how to crack the code on disruption.

Resilience has long been touted as an essential capability for bouncing back from leadership setbacks...

Tom Hood's insight:

I am a big believer that things happen for a reason and in this social world, the right stuff comes to you at the righ time. That is how I see this article from my friend Don Dea on resilience.

This piece summarizes our own work at the Business Leanring Institute on positivity, growth, and resilience and the work of our own Gretchen Pisano which we use in our leadership academy work.

These two passage resonated with me...

"Yet despite the overwhelming consensus and supporting evidence that resilience is vital for success in today’s business environment, the truth remains: resilience is hard. It requires the courage to confront painful realities, the faith that there will be a solution when one isn’t immediately evident, and the tenacity to carry on despite a nagging gut feeling that the situation is hopeless."

"When facing a difficult or challenging situation, it is natural to fall out of balance. The most important first step is to recognize and acknowledge that you are off balance. Once you reach this awareness, you can consciously take action to regain your foothold by engaging in a set of grounding and centering practices, allowing you to channel your energy more adaptively and constructively."

The next decade will see industries transition to a Cloud-enabled world where work can be accomplished anywhere, anytime. This will especially be true of the accounting profession, according to a new study by Intuit.

Tom Hood's insight:

Speaking of Technology and CPAs? Writing this form our 2013 MACPA Technology Conference.

This confirms research from CPA Horizons 2025, the IBM Cloud survey just released adn CCH's research - Technology will continue to transform our Profession and the key areas of social, mobile,and cloud will make place irrelevantin the near future.

"According to Intuit, technology will increasingly be woven into the fabric of the accounting industry in the next decade. The profession will be reshaped as accounting firms use Cloud computing platforms and applications, combined with advanced analytical tools, large data sets, and social and mobile computing."

This confirms our research from survey pf particpants at the AICPA Global Manufacturing Conference http://cpa.tc/3gn

Our own research at the Business Leanring Institute (http://www.blionline.org) shows the answer lies in building a career path tied to the new competencies needed in today's finance/accounitng organizations. Skills like leadership, communications, collaboration, strategic thinking, and technologically savvy are now critical in a rapidly changing and complex environment.

The Deloitte report says it well, “The requirements of the modern finance organization have shifted. Finance should now serve as more than just a steward of a company’s resources and also help chart a path to growth in partnership with other parts of the business,” notes Rich Rorem, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and Finance Transformation leader for the Americas. “Business leaders are looking to their finance organization for a deeper, more hands-on, collaborative approach,” he says. “While CFOs and other finance executives understand this, many of them lead finance organizations that simply weren’t built for that purpose.”

“Finance organizations haven’t historically hired talent or built themselves to meet this demand for partnering with other areas of the company to drive growth. Consequently, there is a significant talent gap developing, which CFOs are now trying to address,” Mr. Rorem adds.

We have built a template to start thinking about how to communicate the career in finance and tie it to competencies and build a learning curriculum that provides these skills we call The Bounce http://cpa.tc/2qh

The speed of learning evolution continues to accelerate as MOOCs (massively open on-line courses) spawn SPOCs (small, private on-line courses) and MOORs (massively open on-line research). Add in social learning, tin can, AICC, and SCORM, we see us quickly moving to just-in-time learning to support the idea of the right talent at the right time with the right skills.

I think we are clearly entering the age of learning as a competitive advantage (for us as individuals and our organizations). in an age of rapid ans accelerating change and complexity, the winners will be those who can keep their L>C, their rate of learning must be greater than the rate of change and greater than their competition.

When Technoduet first published its list of MOOC Providers about six months back, there were just 26 names. Now it has 40 and growing.

Not only number of MOOC providers has multiplied, MOOC themselves have diversified. We now have SPOC, MOOR and even a MOOC based on a popular TV series. The maturity, diversification and popularity of MOOC are all going up.

SAN FRANCISCO – Gavin Newsom’s staff didn’t want him to give this talk.How would it look, they feared, if California’s lieutenant governor – someone who sits on the

Tom Hood's insight:

This quote sums it up nicely, "It reminds me a bit of Kodak," Newsom said on stage. "You have to wake up before the world that you've created is competing against you." Is this impacting adult education and CPE?

GASB released a comprehensive set of tools and resources to help states with the implementation of GASB 68 & 71. This will be a major move toward transparency by state and local governments as state employee pension and other post-employment benefits will be valued differently and liabilities moved from the footnotes to financials onto the balance sheet.

Bitcoin may not replace accountants, but it will streamline and optimise their industry.

Tom Hood's insight:

Can bitcoin be the next disruptor for accounting?

having sat through a bitcoin update a few months ago at the CPA2Biz SaaS roundtable, my head was spinning, then I caught these updates/articles. If you thin cloud is being disruptive, what about this? Tell me what you think?

It’s no secret that online accounting firms are already disrupting the industry, offering a cheaper and often more convenient service than their ‘bricks and mortar’ ancestors.

Towards the end of last year, CoinDesk published a piece suggesting four career fields bitcoin could replace. One of these careers was accounting. I wanted to investigate further into whether this could actually happen.

here is an excerpt from that piece...

"But what is the role of an accountant going to be when decentralized virtual currencies can automate accounting functions such as a general ledger? The block chain appears to be doing this job just fine for bitcoin, and no certified public accountants required.

The explosion of accounting software to automate many financial tasks over the past two decades has, in some respects, lessened the role of accountants already."

In every corner of our economy, there is a search for growth and opportunities. Organizations of all sizes and industries, non-profits and even governments are all working on surviving in this new

Tom Hood's insight:

Rita's message is pretty clear, we need a new strategy playbook that includes innovation as a regular part of our "operating system" or risk being disrupted. We don;t have to look far to see disruption happening verywhere - higher education, government, large corporates, and yes, even the accounting profession.

Almost time to crack open the champagne. Almost time to think about New Year's resolutions too.

Tom Hood's insight:

Advice from the world's leading business thinkers - All agreed that leaders need to prepare for a significant shift in the way they work and think.

Rita McGrath, associate professor of management at the Columbia Business School, and winner of the “strategy” award, said that ideas in strategy have focused for years on sustainable competitive advantage but they no longer work for many sectors of the economy. She said that organizations have a problem confronting this, and cited KodakKODK +5.92%, which had relied on “nostalgia as strategy.”

Nilofer Merchant, an author and winner of the “future thinker” award, put it another way: “ So, the size of your enterprise, the scale, your access to capital–all those things that gave you an edge to new entrants, no longer exists. That’s all extremely scary because that means that your job is no longer about managing the present but inventing the future…all the time.”

But it’s not all bad news, leaders can respond to these challenges. Ms. McGrath suggested: “The first challenge for leaders is to be willing to be open to the idea that your advantage might not last.”

She also suggested that bosses must embrace the new: “You need to have a very firm grip on your firm’s portfolio and on your resource allocation process because if you let powerful business leaders control your resources you’ll never fund new things.

We are hosting Rita McGrath on January 30th from 9:00 am - 12:30pm (EST) at the BWI Ariport Hilton in Maryland and via special webcast - registration and details at http://www.blionline.org/rita Use this special discount code RITA25 to get a 25% discount.

I had privilege of introducing Guillaume at the. association DigitalNow. Conference a few years ago and have been a fan of his and Scoop.it ever since. The idea of content-community-curation is one that I think is important as we look ahead to 2014.

I'm still evenly divided on whether I prefer RebelMouse over Scoop.it. I actually might lead toward Scoop.it except they make you pay extra to use Scoop.it AS your bog (and redirect the domain name). With RebelMouse, you can embedd the whoe page onto a WP platform.

Regardless, I with more Salsa Club owners, studio owners would start curating with Scoop.it and/or RM. It would make it a lot easier for their PR efforts too.

2014 will be an exciting and challenging year for HR, learning, and talent professionals.In summary, this is a year businesses will find it increasingly difficult to attract, retain, and develop

Tom Hood's insight:

Josh Bersin provides some intresting insights about the future of learning here. Love his quote "the talent war is over, the talent won!" and agree about continuous learning and engagement is really about collaboration and participation, yet many still seek the "silver bullet" that simply is not there.

Our work with public company finance/accounting teams and large CPA Firms supports many of your predictions. We are using a model we call the Bounce (http://cpa.tc/2qh) that says the organizations that will be successful in the future will build comprehensive talent development programs that include the 4 C's - Competencies, Career Paths, Curriculum and Cloud / Continuous Learning.

What will you do differently now that the talent war is over and the talent won?

Online education is beginning to show itself as a disruptive innovation, introducing more convenient and affordable services that can transform sectors.

Tom Hood's insight:

A great piece from the recently named #1 Business Thinker in the world (according to Thinkers50), Clayton Christensen.

Two insights for me. First around the Innovation Imperative: Change Everything. The article says it well, we need to rethink our business models and break through the pull of past successes when innovating.

"The lessons from any number of industries teach us that those that truly innovate — fundamentally transforming the model, instead of just incorporating the technology into established methods of operation ­ — will have the final say."

Second revolves around the disruption of eductaion and in our case the professional development market we serve. We are quickly moving (thanks to technology) to an on-demand, just-in-time model with plenty of in-class and instructor-led opportunities. There is no question that the networking and social aspects of learning won;t ever disappear but the can be greatly augmented with the technology options.

"As concepts and skills are taught more effectively online, it’s unlikely that face-to-face interaction will cease to matter. Instead, students will be able to arrange for such experiences when it suits the job they need to get done. Given the reality that we all have different learning needs at different times, that’s a far more student-centered experience."

The Cloud is a business revolution that no CEO can ignore. Here is your cheat sheet on the top 5 strategic issues that you need to know about.

Tom Hood's insight:

Yet another piece about the benefits of the cloud - freeing up your people, adding creativity, collaboration, better customer experience and relationships, etc. I particularly like # 4. Disrupt your industry and #5 Move to a New Cost Curve.

In our recent survey at our Technology Conference (earlier this week), we had

Major gains in innovation within companies have been realized in 2013, as 94 percent of business leaders cited how innovation ties to sustainability and growth as a top organizational priority, up from 79 percent last year.

Tom Hood's insight:

The really big question for CPAs and businesses is, are you working on innovation? if not, chances are you are falling behind quick!

Jack Welch once said, "If things are changing outside your company (CPA Firm) faster than on the inside, you are dying." This latest study from @accountingweb and Plante Moran highlights the rate of change in middle market businesses showing a clear and urgent focus on innovation.

Add to that a mega war for talent is beginning as for every two baby boomers who leave the workforce, only one Gen-Xer is available to replace them.

I find it interesting that professional development is the third biggest "benefit" that people are looking for in their employer. This is challenging for small employers and in our case small CPA Firms. Although we have been working on that with webcasts, e-learning, and in-demand leadership programs like our BLI Leadership Express program.

Add to that a mega war for talent is beginning as for every two baby boomers who leave the workforce, only one Gen-Xer is available to replace them. I find it interesting tat professional development is the third biggest "benefit" that people are looking for in their employer. This is challenging for small employers and in our case small CPA Firms. Although we have been working on that with webcasts, e-learning, and in-demand leadership programs like our BLI Leadership Express program.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.